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Welcome to Day 1476 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomNone Beside Me, and The Only Begotten Son – Worldview WednesdayWisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1476 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. This week, on our Worldview Wednesday episode, we will continue with our study based on a course I recently completed taught by Dr. Michael Heiser. Our study is titled “Sons and Daughters of God: The Believer’s Identity, Calling, and Destiny” Throughout this multi-week course, we will demonstrate that, in the Old Testament, “sons of God” and “holy ones” refers to supernatural beings whose Father is God and who work with God to carry out His will and that this divine family was present before humanity. By fully engaging with biblical texts such as Psalm 82; Psalm 89, and Deuteronomy 32:8–9, our study will show that this divine family functions as a template for God’s human family. God desires of humans, as His imagers, to participate in His council. This study addresses issues such as polytheism, the nature of the (little ‘g’) “gods,” and the uniqueness of Yahweh. Within this study, we will apply insights to the New Testament texts and shows how the metaphor of being in God’s family informs our sense of identity and mission as believers. None Beside Me, and The Only Begotten Son·      Segment 18: “None Beside Me” (Part 3) Incomparability Claim of Cities As we continue on the topic of “None Beside Me,” there is one last thing I want to say about the so-called denial statements. There are other places in the Hebrew Bible where these are used. That is the same statements in situations or contexts that make it very obvious that denial of existence cannot be in the picture. For instance, in Isaiah 47:1, 8, 10, and Zepheniah 2:13, 15, in these passages respectively, the city of Babylon in the Isaiah reference and the city of Nineveh in the Zephaniah reference both claim, both say, “There is none beside me.” Now, are we really going to believe that Babylon and Nineveh respectively actually thought, or wanted us to think, or the writer wanted us to think, that there was no other city than Babylon in existence, there was no other city but Nineveh in existence at the time of Zephaniah? Well, of course not. That would be absurd. There are hundreds and thousands of other cities in existence. The point of the phrase “there is none beside me” is very clearly a claim of incomparability. Babylon is boasting, “There is nobody as good as me. There is nobody like me. No city measures up.” For the Assyrians, that’s how they thought about Nineveh: “Nineveh is the best. Nineveh is incomparable.” Summary So we have the same phrases used in contexts where, very obviously, a denial of existence just cannot work in any coherent way. That’s how we need to think about the denial phrases. When they are used in passages that seem to, on the one hand, deny the existence of the other elohim, but then you have all these other passages and sometimes even the same passage saying, “No, the elohim are real, and they are dangerous; they need to be dealt with. They are hostile to God. God is greater than them.” We can’t, on the one hand, affirm that they don’t exist and then have these other ideas (God’s incomparability to them, God’s greatness) mean...